Moths and night-birds, things that move by the moon make their little sounds. What footsteps there are dissolve and are quickly formless. It is as if there is fog, though there is not. We who walk tonight come out of nowhere and return to it quickly.

Past factories, music halls, churches; over bridges rattling like vertebrae. Armada rides the waves dumb and buoyant like a rust-flecked corpse.

Through the slats of scaffold is the sea. I see myself (shadowed and unclear) and through myself into black water. Into a darkness so profound (random chymical lights like fireflies howbeit) it is an alien communication. It has its own grammar. Unseeing I look to the farmed fish circling autistic in cages, the menfish, the keels pipes crevices inked in, the spaces, the chains splinted with molluscs and algae-slick and the great unseen shape that bears us on, idiotic and futile.

History is formless and oppressive all around me, a nightmare I will make into sense.

A rhythm becomes sensible (extruded from a covert place), gives a shape to this night, gives it time again, and the clocks let out their held breaths.

I make a rooftop way to my moonship. Over torn-up slates and boards and their crossbreeds, through a low nightlit forest of flues steeples watertowers, in ridings not my own. I do not rule here, there is no goretax, it is a day since I have fed and it would take very little to slip along this drainpipe groundward like the drops of calcium that beard it. Very little to find a blood-filled nightwalker and dispose of his her husk but those days are gone, now I am bureaucrat not predator, and it is much better.

It is a long time till dawn but something has passed. We are moving on toward morning. My time is over.

I am on trawlers and houseboats and gone again (fleeting foot-strokes as if uncertain) through Shaddler and its cottages and industry (on for my fat ship). Dry Fall where scored streets are quieter and cushioned in dust.

Where does it come from? Swept hourly by neurotic sea-wind, when does dust touch down?

In some lights (reveries no less than true for that) I see it thick as snowfall and cobwebs clog my passage home. Alone I drown in dust and choke in it, in time’s desiccated exhaust.

I know when things are stirring. I know all the city’s rhythms. Something new is here.

There are tracks on theUroc ’s moon-white decks. Some hand unknown to me has held this rigging.

I watch for the newcomer.

Let us see.

What are you?

In my corridors, toward my berth, you have left your spoor. One, two drops of brine. Smears of something mucal. Scuffed varnish and iron. What are you?

You are hardly hiding from me. You are welcoming me home.

And oh see, here on my threshold you have left me blood.

Drizzled like sugar.

I can hear you behind my door.